There was one standing ovation at the 14th First Annual Ig Nobel prize awards. One really big standing ovation, the biggest they've ever had. Three real Nobel prizewinners were there for the ceremony, at the Sanders theatre at Harvard University. Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986) wore big red comedy glasses. Richard Roberts (physiology or medicine, 1986), the Brit who discovered split genes, was in Wellington boots. They and William Lipscomb (chemistry, 1976) were donning lab coats.

Towards the end of the ceremony, Herschbach, Roberts and Lipscomb rose, along with the rest of a packed house of scientists, to hail the winner of the Ig Nobel peace prize, Daisuke Inoue, of Hyogo, Japan, the man who invented karaoke, and - in the plangent words of his awards citation - thereby provided "an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other".

Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies, founder of the Ig Nobels, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and Education Guardian columnist, said afterwards: "We've had standing ovations before, but we've never seen anything like that." He was worried it was going to go on all night.

The Ig Nobels are the foremost prizes for strange science, the awards that make people laugh and then make them think. And this year's, last Thursday, were pretty moving, too.

Inoue doesn't speak any English. But to accept his award, somehow he did. "Hello everyone, I am Daisuke Inoue. I am from Japan. I am the last samurai - but Tom Cruise couldn't come ... I am very happy to be here to be awarded the Ig Nobel peace prize. One time I had a dream to teach people to sing so I invented karaoke. I didn't know it would be the start of something big. Now more than I ever, I want to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony."

And then - in a hall where Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt have spoken - the Nobel laureates and Karen Bartlett, creator of the studmuffins of science calendar, led a chorus of "You're just too good to be true/Can't take my eyes off of you", especially for Inoue. The whole hall sang along.

In 1971, Inoue was living in Kobe, playing drums for a band that accompanied drinkers in a bar when they wanted to do a turn. He tells me before the ceremony that he was the worst musician in Kobe. Sometimes he couldn't or didn't want to play, so he created an 8-track machine that could do his work for him. He didn't patent it, so he's not rich - though he makes a bit of money from selling pesticides to kill cockroaches in karaoke machines.

But Time magazine named him as one of three most influential Asians of the 21st century; it was only then he realised how popular karaoke was worldwide. He told me, through an interpreter, that he knows he could have been a millionaire. "I could have patented it but at the time I didn't have any idea. At the time I just wanted to help some local artists in a local band so they could do some business."

His favourite karaoke song translates roughly as: "Sake, tears, woman and man." And yes, he does feel sorry for people who just want to have a quiet drink at the bar. "Even in Japan it's difficult to find those places."

Inoue's company paid for him to fly over to Harvard. Sadly, no one from the Vatican turned up to accept the economics award, for outsourcing prayers to India. Nor was there anyone from the Coca-Cola Company of Great Britain to take home the chemistry prize for creating Dasani, bottled water that had twice the legal limit of bromate, a carcinogen. "Winners have a standing invitation to come back, so perhaps next year the Pope will come and perhaps somebody from Coca-Cola will accompany him," said Abrahams.

I caught up with William Lipscomb backstage, in a room with a sign on the door for "Ignitaries". Lipscomb was signing Ig Nobel prize certificates. That's all they get. Well, that and a silver foil cake tray put over their head by way of a medal, and a cereal box, and fame.

"I wouldn't have been to the first one but I've been to most of the others," Lipscomb says. Some of the experiments are really interesting, he says - he remembers a man who cooked a hamburger in three seconds by pouring liquid oxygen on it, and melted the skillet in the process.

Richard Roberts has been involved with the Igs since 1994. Scientists, he says, have a habit of taking themselves too seriously. He's never yet had a request from Abrahams to do something too outrageous - "but don't tempt him". His verdict on the night? "I thought it was great. It would have been better if it had been a little more disorganised - it's starting too appear a bit professional, which is not a good thing."

Former winners often come back, too, just to be a part of it. Kees Moeliker, from the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, winner of the 2003 biology prize for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in a mallard duck, gave the Off Keynote address. At the beginning, he was on stage providing simultaneous translation in Dutch - at the same time as others were providing a similar service in Russian, Japanese, Ukrainian and morse code. It got kind of messy, so they stopped.

The Guardian witnessed Moeliker's first meeting with the winner of the 2004 biology award, Larry Dill, of the Simon Fraser University in Canada. In their paper Pacific and Atlantic Herring Produce Burst Pulse Sounds, Dill and two colleagues, Robert Batty and Ben Wilson, were among the first to record that herrings fart, apparently as a means of communicating with each other. I say among the first: two other scientists, Magnus Whalberg and Hakan Westerberg, from the University of Aarhus in Denmark and the National Board of Fisheries in Sweden respectively, were on to the same thing and published a paper just before: Sounds Produced by Herring (Clupea harengus) Bubble Release. Batty, Whalberg and Westerberg attended the Ig Nobels, too.

Dill had been studying whether herring could hear the very high frequency sounds emitted by approaching porpoises and killer whales. They found that as well as hearing, they were also producing sounds. "It's sort of a bonding thing - but then pre-adolescent boys have been doing this for a millennium."

The scientists described these as fast repetitive ticks (FRTs). "Since they were producing sounds, I presume that the porpoises and whales could hear them, too." The moral: farting can kill.

Dill was interested in Moeliker's mallard observation. He told Moeliker it reminded him of an earlier report, in the 1970s, about a squirrel that had sex with a dead squirrel on a road. "Oh," said Moeliker. "I only looked at birds."

"That's the problem of over-specialisation," said Dill.

During the ceremony, the winners of the psychology prize produced their experiment. Daniel Simons, associate professor at the University of Illinois, showed a film of two groups of basketball players. He asked the audience to count how many times the team in white passed the ball. Halfway through, a man in a gorilla suit came into the picture and looked right at the camera.

Their earlier study revealed that 50% of the people to whom they show the film don't notice the gorilla at all. It's called "inattentional blindness", a failure to see things because their attention was engaged elsewhere. Ninety per cent of people believe they would see it, but only half do, with no obvious extraneous reason.

Simons works on what draws people's attention and what doesn't; the way people involved in car accidents often say, "I was looking right there and I just didn't see it". He was on the faculty at Harvard when he did the experiment, with his colleague Christopher Chabris, which was published in a journal with the headline Gorillas In Our Midst. He knew about the awards but had never been, so was excited to be there at last.

"Marc told me that some of the awards are for things that are outlandish, and other awards are for good science that is funny. He wouldn't guarantee it, but he said I was in the latter category." The paper was written five years ago, but Abrahams had taken a while to honour it. "It could be that he was distracted," said Simons.

Abrahams wore a battered top hat. Winners were allowed to speak for a minute, and if they went on any longer a nine-year-old girl came on stage and whined "Stop now, I'm bored," until they shut up.

The theme of the night was diet, so we witnessed the premiere of the Atkins Diet Opera. As a controlled experiment, three people followed different diets - low carb, high protein; high carb, low protein; and vegan - to see if they would lose weight in one hour. They didn't.

A man and woman painted entirely in silver were on hand to provide a torch by way of a spotlight. New York attorney William J Maloney was called into action just once: he was the V-chip monitor, in case the scientists breached family viewing requirements.

And there was a special moment when Ramesh Balasubramaniam, of the University of Ottowa, and Michael Turvey, of Yale and Connecticut, accepted the physics award for their paper in Biological Cybernetics Journal on Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping.

Balasubramaniam and Turvey are British, adding yet further fuel to UK anxieties about the brain drain. They showed how the hula hoop stays in balance by the principle of angular momentum conservation. Turvey often uses the example of hula hooping when talking to robotocists, to explore how you stabilise a variable object. It's an extension of the problem that evolution had to solve: how to stand up. They accepted the award, Balasubramaniam told me, as "very important recognition of finding profound things in the mundane".

Anyway, that wasn't the special moment. The special moment was when the three real Nobel prizewinners hula hooped live on stage. And how many times has that sentence ever been written before?